A Dad's Blog

Our daughter at almost 4 months, is starting to experiment with rolling over.  Its pretty funny!  She can almost get there, but not quite.  Her massive head gets in the way and she just can’t get it over her bottom shoulder.  But then she gets stuck and can’t roll back.  This causes a bit of a tantrum until we roll her back on her back, at which stage she starts again.

Just another adventure that makes it very hard for a Dad to pry his eyes away and look after the responsibilities of being the patriarch

One of the things we have been working on is teaching our 4 month old how to sleep on her own.  An obvious hurdle we need to overcome in this regard as breaking the association between breast feeding (and even the smell of breast milk for that matter) and falling to sleep.  At night, this often manifests as waking up early in the evening and then only settling when Mom comes in.  Mom does not even have to feed half the time anymore, its just the smell of Mom that has the settling effect.

Today we had a big breakthrough.  After many failed attempts over the last few weeks, on waking in the early evening, I settled her down tonight, within 10 minutes.  I basically re-wrapped our daughter and she settled right away, just lying in her cot.  From there, some soothing murmers put her to sleep again, hopefully and at this stage, for the rest of the night. 

Now, I did not let her cry herself to sleep, I did not pick her up to settle her, I did not offer a bottle, or a dummy/pacifier, I just wrapped her up and spoke soothingly to her.  And all credit where it is due, the techniques described in the book The No Cry Sleep Solution played a big part in this success.  You can read about the book here: http://www.fathers4fathers.com/No_Cry_Sleep_Solution.html

Anyway, I’m feeling pretty good about myself tonight, I think I might have a scotch and retire.